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Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority in psychological profiling, talent management, leadership development, and people analytics. He is the Chief Talent Scientist at Manpower Group, Co-founder and CEO of BrazenX, and Professor of Business Psychology at both University College London, and Columbia University. He has previously held academic positions at New York University and the London School of Economics, and lectured at Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, London Business School, Johns Hopkins, IMD, and INSEAD, as well as being the CEO at Hogan Assessment Systems.
In your book, The Talent Delusion you say “the talent management industry is full of charlatans”. What has been the response to that comment?
There has not been a major reaction to that point, perhaps because charlatans rarely see themselves as such. As I argue in the book, one of the best ways to deceive others is to deceive yourself first: just like the best salespeople truly believe in their sales pitch, the most successful consultants are convinced that the BS advice they offer is accurate and helpful, and this enables them to persuade their clients that they are right. However, if clients evaluated the actual impact of these interventions, or even how much expertise and knowledge consultants have, it would be harder for charlatans to thrive. The Talent Delusion was written partly to help clients and organizations achieve this – and develop actual expertise in talent/HR consultants.
How destructive can it be for a business to promote the wrong people?
The most extreme case studies – Enron, Volkswagen, Lehman Brothers – illustrate pretty clearly that when executives are incompetent or unethical, they cause irreparable damage to their organizations’ reputation, harming their employees, shareholders, and the wider economy, and even destroying their companies. But an even bigger problem is the rarely discussed issue of generic managerial incompetence. Most people are disengaged, hoping for a better job, and underperforming at work, and the single biggest reason is that they are poorly managed. You only need to google “my boss is…” or “my manager is…” to see what people think of their bosses, and that is a direct reflection of the dismal quality of most leaders. Most people would happily take a 15 per cent pay cut if they could...